Chiraag Kapadia on Investigating Clonal Hematopoiesis After CAR T-cell Therapy

"CAR T treatments and cell therapies in general are becoming better and more curative. So now they're going to be a lot more patients that are in survivorship clinics, where there is a higher risk of getting secondary malignancies and cardiovascular events. So, we wanted to know if increased clonal hematopoiesis is potentially contributing to those survivorship effects.”

As outcomes improve in hematological malignancies with the help of cell therapies, including chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, questions remain about the long-term effects of such therapies in patients whose cancer has been eradicated. One such condition exacerbated by cytotoxic chemotherapy is clonal hematopoiesis (CH).

Researchers from Baylor College of medicine, including Chiraag Kapadia, MD/PhD candidate, GS4, investigated CH prevalence in 26 patients previously treated with CD30 CAR T-cell therapy for lymphoma and found that CH occurred frequently in these heavily pretreated patients and increased in clone size following CD30 CAR-T cell therapy. Kapadia presented these data at the 2023 Tandem Meetings |Transplantation & Cellular Therapy Meetings of ASTCT and CIBMTR, held in Orlando, Florida, February 15-19, 2023.

CGTLive spoke with Kapadia to learn more about CH and its potential effects in cancer survivors. He discussed the study’s findings, more research to be done, and why research post-cell therapy is important as survival past cell therapy starts to lengthen.

REFERENCE

Kapadia CD, Rosas G, Tarrano V, et al. Longitudinal dynamics of clonal hematopoiesis in patients receiving anti-CD30 CAR T-cell therapy. Presented at: 2023 Tandem Meetings, February 15-18, 2023; Orlando, Florida. Abstract #49.